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my experience living, with and without depression

Lithium tremors.

I’m definitely having shaky hands and kind of a general quaky feeling, which sucks. I took half a beta-blocker and some vitamin B but I haven’t noticed any improvement, so I am going to stop taking it tonight. I have been on the higher dose for 3 weeks now and I feel that’s long enough to have given it a fair try. I have enough problems getting through a work day without Parkinson’s hands.

I guess I am a bit fixated on knowing for myself, that I have done my best; that way I have no regrets. The problem is that there is basically an endless litany of possible drugs, and once I got through the existing ones, new ones will have made it to market. I am not immune to sunk-costs theory either — the notion that you really should fix your old crap heap of a car that needs a new motor, because you just bought new tires – so if you walk away you feel like you are “losing” your investment, when really the money for the tires is gone no matter what, and if the car is a lemon you might be throwing good money after bad.

I’m not really sure why I’m waiting at this point, to tell the truth. A bunch of reasons I guess. When I was doing research on suicide methods I came across this paper that was about how stressful it was for psychiatrists to have their patients commit suicide, and how they take it really hard, so I have a small niggling feeling of guilt about that. I only want to act on myself; it’s not my desire to cause collateral damage to anyone, but it seems that might be unavoidable. Really, I feel that he should be pleased with himself – he got me through the last two years and I am grateful for his help…

I know these aren’t the kind of statistics I should be calculating, but I figured that if I lived as long as the average lifespan for women in my family, I’d have over 18,000 days left – 18,000!! The fuck I want to do that! And if I keep experiencing the average amount of migraines I would have over 4,000 migraine days! No, thank you. I will take a hard pass on that! I have tried to think of Reasons to Live and have come up with two: things might not suck as much in the future, and I fucking love Depeche Mode and they are going on tour this year. That seems quite out of balance, though, to live 50 years for the sake of a concert or two. I am still puzzled by the “life at any cost” rhetoric.